Ever since Imgur accounts were released, people have been asking non-stop about the ability to upload into their accounts by using the tools. Your request did not go unheard. Today, I’m pleased to announce the new Imgur API, which not only includes support for uploading into accounts, but also includes support for managing every aspect of your account.

Here are just a few of the things you can do:

Upload images anonymously

Upload images into accounts

Create and manage photo albums

Delete images

List all images in your account

Don’t worry if you’re a not a technical person and you don’t care about what an API is. What it means is that, very soon, you will have access to many more tools that enable you to upload into your account from your desktop, mobile phone, iPad, etc.

i) cost? (even though S3 amazon is very competative, are you guessing that $24 year (assuming you’re paying that) will be cheaper than an S3 amazon when u start hitting serious numbers) …
ii) imgur has a rich api that is good to use compared to the competition?
iii) you have a personal/professional relationship with Alan naturally want to support him.
iv) something else I’ve missed?

The reason is that I’ve been using S3 for many projects to host images. I’m always curious to see why other projects use other providers as due diligence.

Now, for backup purposes: I think that you should (1) crawl all the posts, (2) download all the external images, (3) upload all the images onto imgur, and (4) update the posts to use the new image addresses.

Are the changes to make this happen being ported over to the derobins wmd editor? Obviously backend code needs to be written to take advantage of this, but it’d be very nice to have support for this in the Markdown editor.

Here we have a 572KB, 1,349 x 1,078 pixel PNG as part of the post (that is being re-sized by the browser). There really needs to be a way of limiting image size so posts don’t get bogged down in megapixel images.

While this is a much needed addition to the system and it does work really well, I’m curious why you out-sourced the image hosting?

Jeff hasn’t been shy to throw hardware at problems in the past (and the VCs have made sure you could afford it) so storage couldn’t have been the issue. And taking on external dependencies is always a risk.

At long time ago, one of the creators of StackOverflow sold a bug tracking system that had a great scream dump and highlighting application that automatically uploaded an image into a bug report. Can we have the same application integrated into the StackExchange sites please?

@Jeff That would in some cases completely destroy the meaning of those questions if the images are no longer available.

It would be excellent if somehow they are also retained. Probably, all of them can be rehosted to convert those to use these pro account links. I think it would be a huge task, but that would keep the site more sane in the long run.

It’s currently possible to make an image into a link, but it doesn’t seem to be natively supported. I think that when we copy and paste a URL into the upload box, the image should be uploaded and served from imgur, but there should also be a link wrapped around the image, making the image clickable and pointing back to the source image, for posterity and attribution. The link could then be edited manually to go to an originating page rather than a direct link to the image itself.

Since May 2011, there’s a dedicated stack.imgur.com domain. This makes it easier to tell which images use the SE pro account, which is nice to prevent image rot. Not sure what other consequences are, like: can one use the images on other websites (like when using the data dump)?